Inducted into the Thinkers50 Coaching Legends in 2024, David Clutterbuck has authored, co-authored and edited more than 75 books and hundreds of articles. He has delivered over 2,000 conference papers and also co-edits the Routledge EMCC Masters in Coaching and Mentoring series.
Here he is interviewed by Marshall Goldsmith of the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame. In a dynamic conversation between two giants of executive coaching, David and Marshall identify a troubling “global deficit of wisdom” while exploring how truly effective coaches must move beyond simple questioning to provide valuable context and frameworks for their clients.
The discussion explores innovative leadership development methods including:
Drawing from extensive research across global projects, David identifies the four essential qualities of effective modern leaders – courage, compassion, connectedness, and curiosity – and reveals six evidence-based factors determining team success. He also shares insights from his ground-breaking work teaching coaching skills to school children, demonstrating how these fundamental capabilities can transform education.
WATCH THE FULL CONVERSATION WITH DAVID CLUTTERBUCK AND MARSHALL GOLDSMITH:
Des Dearlove:
Hello, I’m Des Dearlove, co-founder of Thinkers50, and I’m delighted to be here today to introduce the latest episode in our Coaching Legends series.
In these sessions we talk to exceptional coaches, individuals who have worked with top business leaders. Our aim is to bring you insights and learnings from their experiences in the C-suite that can make you both a better leader – and a better coach.
This is a collaboration between Thinkers50, 100 Coaches and BetterUp.
I’ll be introducing our special guest in just a minute.
But for those of you who don’t know Thinkers50 so well, our mission is to be the world’s most reliable resource for identifying, ranking, and sharing the leading management ideas of our age. Ideas that can make a positive difference in the world.
That mission dates all the way back to 2001, when we published the first ever global ranking of management and business thinkers. We’ve published a new ranking every two years ever since. In 2011, we introduced our Distinguished Achievement Awards and Gala, which the Financial Times calls ‘the Oscars of Management Thinking.’ And shortly after that, the Thinkers50 Radar – 30 exciting up-and-coming thinkers, published every January, and the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame.
In 2023, with our friends at 100 Coaches and BetterUp, we added our Coaching Legends list, which recognises and honours the lasting influence and contribution of exceptional coaches.
So, what’s the red thread that links all our work at Thinkers50? Thinkers50 connects the most practical thinkers with the most thoughtful practitioners.
Our mantra is: Thinkers + Doers = Impact. That’s what this series is all about!
Coaches play a vital part in developing leaders. They are the connective tissue between the world of ideas and practice. As well as being originators of ideas, coaches are the honeybees of best practice – cross pollinating the leadership world with the best ideas wherever they come from.
And that is certainly true of our special guest today. It gives me particular pleasure to introduce Dr David Clutterbuck.
David holds a research PhD from Kings College, London, a postgraduate diploma in coach supervision from Oxford Brookes and is a visiting professor at Henley. He is a distinguished fellow of The Conference Board and leads a global alliance of educators, Coaching and Mentoring International. David is the author of some 80 books and hundreds of articles. He is also co-editor of the Routledge EMCC Masters in Coaching and Mentoring Series.
David is co-founder and special ambassador for the European Mentoring and Coaching Council and one of his current projects is trialling materials to develop school-age coaches and mentors, with a target of achieving five million young coaches over a five-year period. He is a serial entrepreneur, having built and sold two businesses, and has served as a non-executive director on a variety of boards. David was inducted into the Thinkers50 Coaching Legends in 2024.
On a personal level, I worked with David when I was a young wet-behind-the-ears journalist. By a strange coincidence, so did Stuart Crainer, my co-founder at Thinkers50. David taught me much of what I know about writing articles and books, and he also gave me my first big break in journalism with a by line in the London Times for an article we wrote together about Followership. So, it is with great respect and gratitude that I welcome David to the Coaching Legends series.
And asking the questions today, we are delighted to welcome another legend of the coaching world, none other than Marshall Goldsmith. Marshall’s New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers include one of my all-time favourite book titles, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. After more than a decade in the Thinkers50 Ranking, in 2017 he was inducted into the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame.
Marshall welcome, and over to you.
Marshall Goldsmith:
It is a great pleasure to be here and to welcome our guest.
Hello David, I’m looking so forward to talking with you. A couple of questions.
David Clutterbuck:
Me too.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Question number one. The world is changing. What sort of leaders do we need right now?
David Clutterbuck:
Well, I think the big thing that we see is there’s a global deficit of wisdom. We need wise leaders more than we’ve ever needed them before. And by and large, we don’t have them. And this is not just in politics, this is in business. Wherever you look, we need wise leaders, and wisdom seems to be something that’s gone by the board in so many cases. So part of the role, I think, of my role as a coach educator is helping coaches help people become more wise.
Marshall Goldsmith:
I like it. I like it. Very interesting thing. Most coaches don’t give advice as such. I’m not one of those coaches. I do give advice. So I think there’s a role for different types of coaches. And I don’t like to get into what is a coach and what isn’t. Paul Hersey, my old mentor told me, “Never argue about semantics, so let’s just focus about helping other leaders get better.”
In terms of helping leaders get better, there are different types of coaches. What are some different types? My advice, I’m much more in an advice-giving role. I’m more of a teacher coach and a facilitator coach. What are some other kinds of different coaching roles?
David Clutterbuck:
Well, I think first there’s a difference between coaches and mentors, which is completely confused as well because the idea is that mentors gave advice and coaches didn’t was completely invented by coaches in the 1990s who wanted to take their income against people who were doing what they were doing for money, for free. So it was nonsense.
And we’ve got this group called the Coach Maturity Research Group, and we’ve been looking at what coaches do. So we did research back about 15, 20 years ago where we identified what we thought at the time was a stage model, we’ve since questioned that, but how coaches grow, the different mindsets they have, doing coaching to people, doing coaching with people, being a coach in what we call a systemic collective, just holding the client while they have the conversation they need to have with themselves.
So in the latest research, we’ve gone back and we’ve asked lots of coaches, people who were perceived by other coaches as role models, so very experienced, very wise coaches, and we’ve asked them about their journey. And one of the things that’s come out of that very clearly is that the more mature a coach becomes, the more of themselves they use. They use story, they use parable, they use their own intuition, their feelings. And it ties very well with the data that comes from our comparisons of coaching and mentoring, because basically all coaching and mentoring do is you help somebody have greater clarity about their internal world and a bit more and some greater clarity about the external world.
Now, if you’re being this pure coach, whatever that is, and you don’t give any advice, you don’t go out of your little box, you get stuck in that middle block, middle part of it. If you’re able to draw on your own experience and give context, that’s important, so something that you know that they don’t, refer them to some reading, a framework to use, all of those kinds of things. Giving people context actually in my view is absolutely clearly part of this continuum. And the reason that so many coaches don’t give context is because they don’t have any.
Marshall Goldsmith:
They’re not bad people. They can be good, what do you call it, Socratic coaches.
David Clutterbuck:
Yeah, which is fine if that’s what you need, but our research into coaching complexity tells us that actually, the AI can do that better than most of them.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Yeah, I agree with you. That makes a ton of sense to me. Since you and I agree on it, it must be incredibly valid.
David Clutterbuck:
Yes, exactly. Well, I did introduce somebody once as a wise old man with a wicked sense of humour, or is it the other way around?
Marshall Goldsmith:
My next question is what new skills do leaders need to be a success in a new environment? For example, AI is coming, all kinds of things are coming. What are some new skills leaders are going to need?
David Clutterbuck:
Well, we did a comparison of coaches and leaders, the critical qualities in them, the ones that made the difference. We were looking at the modern literature, the evidence-based literature. We came up with four things for both that are exactly the same. Courage, compassion, connectedness and curiosity. And those four things, they’re the substrate for effective leaders. And so what we’ve been learning recently is that basically leaders need to stop doing other people’s jobs for them. They need to focus on the things that they can do where they can add real value.
And we did this study with the conference board a couple of years ago and we were asking HR directors, “Post-COVID leadership, what are the big challenges for you?” And some of these HR directors were saying, “Anything up to half of our top 200 or 300 are obsolete leaders,” for two basic reasons. One, they can’t let go of command and control so they’re working harder and harder and doing more and more and achieving less and less. And the other one was that they need to think systemically. They’re linear thinkers. So there’s this vast potential coming out now for coaches to work with these leaders to help them with these two problems. Big problem. Does the coach actually have this level of systemic thinking to be that step ahead of the client? And in many cases the answer is no, they don’t.
Marshall Goldsmith:
It’s interesting. One of the things I always teach is the importance of learning from people around you, stakeholder-centred feedback. It’s learning from people around you. And I just did a LinkedIn survey today. I’ve already gotten about 500 responses, and I asked a question, “How frequently does your manager ask you for suggestions on how he or she can improve?” Now, you inspired me with this command and control comment. The answer was 67% of the people said, “My manager almost never asked me how he or she can improve.”
David Clutterbuck:
It doesn’t surprise me. In fact, I’m surprised the figure’s as good as that, frankly. One of the things that I persuade people or try to persuade manager leaders that I work with is, “How about you sharing your personal development plan with your team and asking them how they could contribute to your achieving that?” Some of them go white, but it’s such an obvious thing.
Another thing that I love doing when I’ve a leader who’s got some balls, if you like, but has some courage, I say, “Would you be prepared to be coached in front of your team by me?” And if they do that and that works okay, I then say, “And would you be prepared to be coached by your team while I sit in and hold the safe space?” When a manager can do that, they’ve really got a different set of behaviours with their team.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Well, that eliminates a lot of that excessive command and control stuff right there, just doing nothing else. Okay, next question. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, the importance of moving from a know-it-all to a learn-it-all company. Now, we’ve already started touching on this. What does this mean for leaders?
David Clutterbuck:
Well, there’s so much that we can dump, what I call HR bling, all this stuff that makes assumptions about people without any real evidence behind it. And one of the things is the manager actually understands what’s helping or hindering the performance of the people below them, which is nonsense. So what we’ve been experimenting with is what we call BEAU teams: Business Evolving As Usual. So what we’re doing here, the performance appraisal process is owned not by the manager but by the employee. And they go out – and you can see echoes here in feedforward – but they go out and they interview their stakeholders and they come back with a plan for the next six, eight weeks or whatever for what they’re going to achieve from a task perspective, but also what they’re going to achieve from a learning perspective. They then take this to their team leader and the team leader coaches them on how they’re going to achieve this. So it’s shifting the whole balance from one, “Well, I know best. I can judge your performance,” to, “Actually, you know best.”
Marshall Goldsmith:
Right. And the leader is a facilitator of learning.
David Clutterbuck:
Exactly so. And we can go even further than that. We’ve been putting together all those personal development plans into a team development plan, which is the bridge between the personal development plan and the business plan.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Yes.
David Clutterbuck:
And you can review this on a regular basis so you can be learning together and adapting together, and it’s a very powerful concept.
Marshall Goldsmith:
I love it. I love it. Now one of the next questions is how can leaders ensure continuous learning throughout their career and how’s that been changing? Now, to me this is critically important because the amount of time it requires to get obsolete is very slim. What you said, half the leaders, the one company you talked about, they’re obsolete. So how would you deal with this issue of continuous learning?
David Clutterbuck:
Well, I like to sit down with a CEO and say, “How much time do you have for learning?” “Oh, I’m so busy. I’ve just so many things to do.” I say, “Okay, so tell me about your early career. Did you make any mistakes?” “Well, yes, a few.” “And did they cost the company any money?” “Well, no, not really,” apart from the guy that put a hole in the supertanker, but then none of us is perfect. And so, “Okay, let’s bring it up to date. What’s the cost of your mistakes now? So don’t you think you should be putting more time into learning than you were then? Oops.”
And so we try and get them to rethink the way they see things. I like to challenge them. If you’re not challenging your assumptions on a regular basis, you’re not growing. You’re shrinking. So how do you find opportunities to be challenged? I like to go into a bookshop when I can find one these days because they keep closing down, but into a big bookshop. I stand in the non-fiction section, I close my eyes and I just point and I go turn around and I point. Wherever I’m pointing, I’ll go there and I’ll look at the books there and I’ll say, “What can I learn from origami?” or whatever. And of course there are parallels there that you can play with. So there’s loads of things that we’ve done there.
Something else that I love is the shadow board. So you’ve got these guys at the top and they’re not really, mostly… You know the headless ghost?
Marshall Goldsmith:
Yeah.
David Clutterbuck:
Yeah. Well, the top teams in the boards in most companies are just like that. They’re not really connected to the organisation. They’re wandering around … And so what we’ve done in a number of cases, we’ve created shadow boards. So we take some bright young managers or professionals in their mid to late 20s at the bottom of the organisation and they meet together, the same number as there are on the top team. And then we give them the same papers that the top team gets for its meetings and they sit as if they were the board or the executive team, and each of their meetings is chaired by a different member of the executive each time.
So they now are holding a shadow board meeting and they consider the same things and they come up with their comments and questions and thoughts and then the real top team meets. So these guys, one of them will come and sit in and observe the top team meeting. The member of the top team who was chairing the junior meeting will say, “Well, it’s interesting. Now the junior board had a very different view of this. Would you like to explain that?” And so what we’re doing is creating this learning process both ways. And it’s very powerful.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Look, I love what you’re doing and one thing I like about you is you try to practice what you preach and you are always learning yourself. I like the idea that you started being a stand-up comedian. I love that. Life is short. You might as well do something new. Just describe a little bit about your own journey and maybe even that example of being a stand-up comedian, which I love.
David Clutterbuck:
Well, certainly. I’ve done all sorts of things. I’ve jumped out of the outside of a helicopter to skydive. I’ve skied off of the edge of a mountain. I’ve done all sorts of wonderful things. But I think that has to be the scariest thing of the lot.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Oh, I can’t imagine.
David Clutterbuck:
And I won’t regale you with my antics. It would probably get the whole video explicated. But it was a lot of fun and it taught me timing. And now I chair the research committee at the London School of Comedy looking at social and well-being uses of laughter, helping people with depression. Remarkable results of that. Calming things down in a mental health prison, keeping kids out of knife crime. These are all social uses of laughter. We don’t have enough laughter in organisations. Things are too serious.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Well, also in America, we went through this period of political correctness where you couldn’t say anything to anybody about anything, where people just became so buttoned up. Now, maybe things are lightening up a little bit, but you’re exactly right. People did become so, so, so serious, and life is short. Life is short. Might as well enjoy it. I mean, what the hell. You’re putting in a lot of time anyway, you might as well have some fun here.
David Clutterbuck:
If it ain’t fun, what are you doing it for? I should tell you that I was taken to task by a very earnest young lady a while ago who said to me, “Why don’t you have some pronouns behind your name? He/him or he/it or whatever.” I said, “Let me tell you how I’m experiencing that comment. I’m experiencing it as very ageist.” There’s a silence. My age, gender and things like that really aren’t the most important thing in my life.
Marshall Goldsmith:
I don’t care.
David Clutterbuck:
Yes, yes, basically. But if you want to put some initials behind my name, put NDY. And there was silence. It took about 10 minutes before somebody came back, “What does NDY stand for?” Not dead yet.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Not dead yet. Not dead yet. Still here. Still here. Now, if you look back on your career, all right, what is the toughest coaching challenge you’ve ever had and how did you handle it?
David Clutterbuck:
Yeah, I think a lot of it is to do with team coaching, I think. It’s when you’ve got a team that’s disunited and they finally come together and the only thing that’s uniting them is the fact that they can use you as a scapegoat. And there you are like a rabbit in the headlights. You think, “Oh my God, what do I do now?” So nowadays they do that and I say, “Oh, isn’t that fascinating? That’s the first time you’ve become united. What’s happening for you? And do you usually shoot the messenger? Is that your habit?” But being in that kind of situation, being able just to step out of it and realise that whatever happens is a learning experience.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Yeah, I had a hilarious experience relative to that being a scapegoat. Many years ago I was working in some company, right, and I interviewed everybody in the team and they just sucked. Their teamwork was so bad, right? So I get up and I’m reading this summary report and I’m not saying who said what. Well, the CEO sitting there goes, “Well, I’m not sure I agree with that stuff,” right? Well, then some other guy said, “Well, I’m not sure I agree with it either.” Finally, I said, “Who the hell wrote this thing? I interviewed you. I wrote down what you told me, and I’m reading back what you told me. Who are we bullshitting here? Let’s grow up.” It was so funny. They’re arguing with me. You told me this shit, right? What are you telling me, man? I’m just reading what you wrote.
David Clutterbuck:
Yeah, it happens all the time. People want to repudiate what they’ve said because there’s no psychological safety.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Now, talk about tough assignments, you had the dubious honour of mentoring Des and Stuart. Now, I’ve known this for years. I love Thinkers50, but I can’t imagine mentoring those guys other than they do have a good sense of humour. What was it like to mentor them?
David Clutterbuck:
Like I said, they needed a good sense of humour to work with me. But it was a long time ago and we were both a lot younger, I think. I had a whole string of young people who worked with me rather than fought for me. And they were learning their craft and particularly if they were working directly for me like Des did, I would contract them right at the beginning, “Look, after a couple of years, you’re going to outgrow me, and that’s okay. When that starts to happen, let’s talk about it and let’s see how I can help you with the next stage of your career.”
So it’s basically, “How do I help you move on?” And it became straightforward. It was good for them, it was good for me. And I think seeing people launch out and do different things, new things, that’s a joy. It’s a real pleasure to see that happening. So all of these people have gone on to do interesting things, most of them in the field of journalism. Both Des and Stuart just turned it into something different. And Des did this book with me, The Makers of Management, or was it Stuart? One of the two of them did it with me. It was a long time ago. But we did this book, The Makers of Management.
Marshall Goldsmith:
I think it’s a good idea, move on to something different. And one of the things I always tell my clients, one of the first things, especially the CEOs, is say, “If I tell you to leave, leave. If I tell you to leave, leave.” Now, I’m not telling you to leave for no reason. 100% of the CEOs I’ve told to leave and left have thanked me a hundred percent. Three didn’t. All had crappy experiences. Two got fired and the other regretted it. So I mean, look, I don’t know that much about much, but if I tell you to leave, get out and back to doing something new and different.
We’ve got some great role models. Harry Kramer, a former CEO, he’s working. He gives talks, he travels around the world, he donates money to charity, totally happy guy. Hubert Joly was CEO of the year in the United States at Best Buy. Just a great guy, won the Thinkers50 award, but now he’s doing leadership training at Harvard. He loves it. He’s coaching people, and you know what they all want to be when they grow up, David, secretly? They have a dream. They want to be like us someday.
David Clutterbuck:
Oh dear.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Let’s get real. They all want to be us when they get old.
David Clutterbuck:
Fortunately, I have no desire to grow up.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Oh, it’s funny. Now speaking of us, Des introduced you as a member of the Coaching Legends. You’re a legendary looking guy there. What does it mean to be a Coaching Legend?
David Clutterbuck:
I don’t go chasing after accolades. That’s not my thing. In fact, I was asked if I had a sort of motto to live by a little while ago and I said, “Yes, it’s quite simple. If I have to die of a terrible disease, let it not be vanity.” And that sort of sums things up for me. When I was asked to write my autobiography, I refused several times. But then they said, “Well, how about writing a book that looked at all the evolution of coaching and leadership?” And introduced some of the thinking around that. I said, “Yeah, that’s great a book on how stupid I was. That’s great. I can do that.” And so I get these honours every now and then, and the ones I don’t take at all seriously are the ones where they’re popularity votes.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Right.
David Clutterbuck:
Thinkers50 is different. Thinkers50 has got some thinking behind it. It’s a rigorous process. And so receiving that, I am deeply honoured to receive that. I think that’s way above so much of the flim-flap, if you like, that’s out there. I value this.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Well, I totally agree with you. Thinkers50 has been wonderful for me. And I think they provide a service to people like us because they really do take it seriously and they provide an environment for people like us, and Hubert I mentioned is a great example now. He’s a big advocate of Thinkers50. He’s coming to the next meeting and he is a former leader, but is now also a really good thinker. And so I think it’s just wonderful.
All right, next. Now, along from all this for-pay stuff you do occasionally, what about your work in Africa with school-age coaches? That sounds like fun.
David Clutterbuck:
Yeah. Well, it’s more than just Africa. We’ve just done some of the experiments in Africa. But the idea that we came up with was that, well, if we’re going to really democratise coaching, we need to get it to people who would never otherwise be able to afford it. And then we started thinking about, well, where’s the best place to learn to coach or to mentor? And school’s the right place. If you’ve got these skills at an early age, it helps you have better career planning. When you join a company, you’ve got the idea of being a coach or mentor so they don’t have to bash it into you when you get to 30 and you’ve picked up all sorts of habits from Theory X managers.
So we have been experimenting. We’ve done experiments in Malaysia, in Russia, several in the UK. And now we have… the current experiments are in Cape Town in South Africa and in Birmingham in the UK. And the kids get it. So we’re basically teaching the teachers to teach the kids. And in Birmingham UK, we’ve got 11 and 12-year-olds coaching nine and 10-year-olds. And the impact is amazing both on them and the other kids that they’re helping.
Marshall Goldsmith:
No offense to you or me, but I don’t recall ever saying too much that a smart nine-year-old or 10-year-old couldn’t figure out anyway.
David Clutterbuck:
Absolutely. Yes, yes. Yeah. They really do get it instinctively. They haven’t got all the theory and other stuff, and they don’t need it. There’s enough innate wisdom in them to be able to sit down and have a conversation that helps somebody else reflect and grow, and that’s all that’s needed.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Now what else are you working on that’s fun and exciting?
David Clutterbuck:
All sorts of things. We’ve just launched into the next stage of testing. We’re about to go commercial on this what I think is an amazing app. Basically, some years ago Facebook asked me to come in and look at their highest performing teams globally. So we were interested in what’s the difference in those teams and how they’re led and so forth and other teams within Facebook and the other teams the people in those teams have worked with. And we came up with a lot of data and we also did a massive literature search.
Subsequent with that, we started really looking at if a team is a complex adaptive system nested within other complex adaptive systems, how do we help the team see the systems? And we ended up with a vast literature search. We identified over 140 different evidence-based factors that affected a team’s performance. And then we brought them gradually down, through focus groups and other means, we brought them down to six. And the six are purpose and motivation; relationships with the external stakeholders; internal relationships – particularly psychological safety; internal processes like communications, decision-making and workplace organisation; the pace of learning – are you learning fast enough to keep pace with your environment; and leadership, by which you mean not being the leader, but the act of taking accountability and responsibility for things that need it.
In subsequent research, we went out and tried to identify what are the things that only a leader can do that can’t be distributed amongst the team. We only found two things that only the leader can do. Everything else can be distributed in part, at least. One of the two is all that stuff about liaising above and getting the vision and the resources and all that stuff. The other one was protecting the team from interference from outside that stopped it doing its job. Everything else is somewhere distributed or shared by the team leader with the team.
So what we’re able to do now is to identify the conversations that aren’t happening in teams because we’re able to say the perceptions of the team on, take psychological safety. Team leader thinks there’s a load of psychological safety. It’s a wonderful place. Some of the other people at the other end of the spectrum, completely different. So what we’re looking at is where’s big divergences? Because if you’re not talking about them, they’re getting in the way of your performance. We’ve now got data on over 500 teams. We can’t find a single issue that’s brought to team coaching that isn’t a factor or a mixture of the interaction between those things.
And we’re now launching the next version. Ultimately, it’d be possible soon for a company to triage its entire network of teams and say, “This team, we’re going to trust the team leader to go with this and this and this. That’s fine. Here’s some help. Go on a course,” or, “Here’s some guidelines,” whatever, “And this one really needs team coaching,” or something, or, “The team leader needs the coach to help them get through a difficult period.” But nothing like that exists or has existed before and it’s just something that’s been my big project for the last three or four years.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Very exciting. If you look back on your life, what was your biggest mistake as a coach? I’ll tell you mine and you can tell me yours too. What’s your response?
David Clutterbuck:
Okay. In a way, I don’t think of them as mistakes unless I’ve repeated them.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Sure.
David Clutterbuck:
Otherwise, they’re a learning experience. One mistake that I do have quite a long time ago, I found myself in a business partnership with somebody I subsequently realised was quite a serious sociopath.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Yeah, that’s a mistake.
David Clutterbuck:
That is a mistake. And we got out of that one. And then not so many years ago, I suddenly found a different relationship. Oh my God, we’re repeating history. So I realised that actually my general trusting nature, I’m one of those people to trust people until proved otherwise, I realised that that was a mistake and it’s a mistake that I hope I’m not going to make again.
Marshall Goldsmith:
My biggest mistakes have always been my own ego. I get confused sometimes that I forget that my name is Marshall Goldsmith, not Jesus Christ. And I actually thought I could save somebody every now and again, which is a totally idiotic idea. And I had this only pay for results thing, which is good because you don’t get paid a couple times, you realise, “What a moron. I’m an idiot.” And the thing I’ve learned from my clients is that they don’t care, don’t waste my time. They’re not going to get any better. I’m not going to have a… People ask me, “How do I inspire people that don’t care?” I don’t. Hell, if they don’t care, it’s fine with me. Don’t care. Just don’t waste my time, right?
David Clutterbuck:
I’m just laughing here because I do an April Fool’s blog every year and one was: be the first coach into space. We had quite a few applications for that. Another one was hot stone coaching and the eight principles of hot stone coaching. If you spell the acronym, the first letters of each principle backwards, it spelled bullshit. And this year I invented an AI that would coach you in a variety of different persona. And so one of the personas that I tried out was Donald Trump who basically said, “Look, I don’t give a damn whether you change or not. It doesn’t matter to me anyway. I stopped listening five minutes ago.”
Marshall Goldsmith:
Well, this next question is, and I think you’ve covered about advice for leaders, what advice do you have for the next generation of coaches? And you give me your answer and I’ll give you my answer both.
David Clutterbuck:
Well, I think it’s about thinking. It’s about thinking how do you add value? The AI is at your heels. It’s snapping away there. You’ve got to find better ways of adding value than delivering the growth model. And so you have to engage more and more with complexity. Now, we’ve identified 10 levels of complexity in coaching all the way up to coaching the Meta system. And the further up that chain you go, the more value you are adding and the more satisfying it is and the more you’re going to keep ahead of the technology.
Marshall Goldsmith:
I guess my reflections are very parallel to yours. That is, right now they’re cranking out thousands and thousands of people who are called “coaches” and America unemployed people used to be called realtors and now they’re called life coaches. So they’re just cranking these people out by the thousands. And my advice for the next generation of coaches, very parallel, you got to know something. You got to learn something. And if all you are is the same as everybody else, you’re a commodity. And it’s not that they’re bad people. They’re typically good people. They may be doing good work, but there’s just too many of them. And at the bottom end, they’re making 30, $40 an hour. I mean, come on. Secretaries make more money than that. It’s just terrible. So my advice to next generation coaches is build a brand, have knowledge, bring unique expertise, something, because if all you are is just another one of them, you’re a commodity. You’re a commodity.
David Clutterbuck:
Absolutely. This came out of my research group, very clear, what counts is not what you do, but who you are.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Exactly. I love this. I love it. Well look, thank you very much. Thank you very much. Now, thank you. Thanks to everybody for tuning in and check out Thinkers50.com. And next thing is, look for more information on this space about the Coaching Legends, Leaders50, Thinkers50 Coaching and Mentoring Awards. And finally, David, always a joy to talk to you.
David Clutterbuck:
Pleasure.
Marshall Goldsmith:
Thank you.
David Clutterbuck:
Cheers.
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Thinkers50 Limited
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Thinkers50 Limited
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